Pythian Group

It is not unusual that a DBA needs to run the same query across multiple instances. The query can be anything from a simple line to retrieve a specific value (such as an instance version), to others that involve data modifications or schema changes.

SQL Server 2008 brought the ability to execute Statements Against Multiple Servers Simultaneously by simply creating a local server group or broadly using a Central Management Server and one or more server groups. Inside these groups there should be one or more registered servers.

There is also the commercial Red-Gate SQL Multi Script with an Unlimited edition license that allows you to run your code against any number of SQL server instances.

Before SQL Server 2008, there was no native support for running the same query against multiple instances using shipped tools, so it can be approached in one of these ways: Read the rest of this entry . . .

Using OLE DB to get SQL Server to connect to Oracle servers can be done quite easily, but there are a few little tricks you should know to make it go smoothly. Once it’s working it seems to work quite well. I hope this blog post will save you a few headaches.

Recently a client asked me to create a simple SSIS package that would connect to Oracle, pick up some data with queries they provided, import it to SQL Server, and eventually export the data as flat, delimited text files.

With SSIS you can use the OLE DB provider that Oracle provides. If your SQL Server is 32-bit, you can install the 32-bit Oracle client and stop there.

If it’s 64-bit, there are a couple different ways to get the Oracle providers working. Read the rest of this entry . . .